


One Week

by greenbeetle1201



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 08:34:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16091945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbeetle1201/pseuds/greenbeetle1201
Summary: My attempt at the forced sexual situation trope. Two friends become spies and a mission goes wrong. From the POV of a social worker trying to decide proper action to take for the occurrence.





	One Week

**Author's Note:**

> One shot.

TUESDAY  
He was waiting for me in a stained, green, plastic, armless chair out in the hallway. He had his chin up and his chinos were fresh-pressed. It was the same every Tuesday.   
“She said no.” I told him.   
He looked down at his scuffed, brown dress shoes. The hemline of his pants was a little short for his legs, so I could see that his socks had yellow ducks on them. He looked up at me and nodded his head once.   
“I’ll be back next week.” He said, standing up.  
“Don’t give up.”   
“I haven’t yet.”  
I watched him walk all the way to the end of the hallway and turn left toward the exit before I went back into her room. She was staring out the window with her hands in her lap, the hot afternoon turning her hair red.   
“He’s gone.” I told her.   
“Thank you.”   
I picked her chart up off the end of her bed and noted her lack of expression at his departure. Above the line I was marring with fresh ink were identical descriptions-seven of them.   
“This is week eight, Griselda. Only two more weeks to go.” I said with forced enthusiasm.  
“And then what?”  
“You go home.”  
She kept staring out at the geese on the pond-all white, orange, and waddling. If she had a pretty smile, she’d kept it from me for all eight weeks, but I felt that her face could be pretty.  
“I’m going back to my office, Griselda. If you need me, you know how to call.”   
She nodded once-almost as he had-and I backed out of the room.

I pulled a manilla folder out of my filing cabinet with her name on the tab. It was thicker than most of the files I kept. I opened it on top of my desk calendar and absently thumbed through its contents: interviews, photographs, phone transcripts, and employee records kept by the agency on both Griselda and the man in the hallway along with my own personal observations over the past eight weeks. When they’d asked me to take on the case, I couldn’t refuse. Drowned in the mire of cabinets full of technicalities and red tape policies, when I’d heard about Griselda’s case, I jumped on it out of honest, morbid fascination. It hadn’t been until I’d seen her that I realized who she was.  
“Specs.” I’d said involuntarily. “I’m sorry. It just came out.”  
“It’s fine.” She said.  
“And so…this guy…” I looked down at the file for reference. “…This Samuel Flemming…”  
“Twitch.” She confirmed.   
“What about Wheels?” I asked.   
“He wasn’t with us. He was trying to find us.”   
“So he was on the mission, he just wasn’t in the compound?”  
“Precisely. We weren’t meant to be in the compound either.”   
Reports had indicated that when they found her and Samuel, they were in separate rooms in the compound and that when they’d opened his cell door, he’d told them to get her first-to leave him. When they’d refused, he’d gone into an absolute fit and yelled at the officers until they sat him down in the helicopter and he told them everything through a steady deluge of unlivable guilt.   
I pulled a picture of the two of them out of the file on my desk. They were in a photo booth-both of them several years younger, a little plumper. Samuel had gladly given every relatable shred of evidence to the agency at our request. Birthday cards, pictures, notes they’d passed in class during high school.   
“I didn’t realize you two went so far back.” I’d remarked that first day. She was still bruised and pale from her long exile from the sun-her skin almost blue.   
“Yeah.”  
“And there was no romance between you in all that time?”  
“No.”  
“It was lucky you were both hired at the same time.”  
“It was.”  
Specs, Twitch, and Wheels were the nicknames the agency had given them. We all called them the nerd herd after the types of missions they were assigned. Wheels was the robotics expert. He could do anything from building covert spy drones to Macguyvering his way out of near-death obstacles with shoe laces and chewing gum. Twitch was named so because of his Rain-Man penchant for remembering faces, names, and details. He was the encyclopedia of the trio-often deducing dangers and inconsistencies that had saved them all on multiple occasions. Specs was the hacker/psychologist. Along with her exceptional knowledge of coding, she had the social graces the other two lacked and could read someone’s body language like a book.  
Stories of their adventures were passed around like weekly sit com episodes. There was always some car chase, some battle of wits, some mistaken identities. They lived movie lives and lived to tell the tales-drawing near death and suspense, but never failing one another.   
I put the photo booth picture back in the file and closed my eyes. I pulled my glasses off and rubbed the bridge of my nose methodically.

 

WEDNESDAY  
“Good morning Griselda.” I greeted her as I entered her room. She was finishing her breakfast of a cold biscuit and coffee.  
“Good morning.” She replied.   
“You remember what today is?”   
“I do.”  
“Have you made a decision?”  
“Yes. I’ve decided not to watch it.”  
I pursed my lips to hide my disappointment. It had taken eight weeks for the agency to obtain the footage and clear it for my use. It was all I had left.   
“That’s entirely your decision.” I said. “Samuel has decided to view it when he comes Tuesday though.”  
“I don’t care. I don’t want to see it again. I was there.”  
“It may be beneficial for you to see it. You were unconscious. It may help…”  
“I don’t want to see it.”   
I hadn’t seen it either, but I trusted Samuel’s story.   
“I don’t want to watch it either.” I said.   
“Well then don’t. It’s that easy.”  
“I need to know what happened.”  
“You know what happened.”  
The dvd of the footage was sitting on my desk when I got back to my office. I figured I’d try with Griselda before I watched it myself. I picked it up and put my finger through the hole in the middle and looked at the rainbow sheen on the disc. I opened my disc drive and sat the dvd back on my desk before I closed the drive again. I wasn’t ready.   
I looked at her file sprawled across my desk and decided on an interview instead. It was in a thin, purple, plastic case entitled “Griselda James Interview 1.” I’d read the transcript, but I hadn’t watched the video. I figured I had what I needed to know from the papers.   
I popped it into the disc drive and let the media player automatically play it. She was in the conference room seated across from a committee. Three women and four men in business suits all with lists of questions in their hands.   
“Start from the beginning Ms. James. How did you and Mr. Flemming arrive at the compound?” A woman with short black hair asked.   
Griselda looked like wilted celery-bent over the table like a rag doll. “We were on our way to Canada. We were going through the mountains. I guess somewhere near Kentucky. Twitch and I were going to pick up weapons at a contact we had with the agency. Real incognito stuff. Looked like a moonshiner. We were a little wary, but he gave us what we’d been told he would have.”  
“And where was agent Barlow?” A man in his seventies asked. He was talking about Wheels.   
“He was going ahead so that by the time we got there, he would already have the cameras and security we would need in Canada.”  
“And what were you going to do in Canada?”  
“That’s classified.” She smirked.   
“When were you supposed to meet Agent Barlow?” A thin man asked.   
“Whenever we got through the mountains. No set time really, but I guess he got suspicious after we hadn’t made it in a couple of weeks.”  
“What happened after you met up with the contact?”  
“We stowed everything we needed in the trunk and started heading north.”   
“Did you make stops along the way?”  
“Yeah. We’d only driven for a day. I think we were still in the mountains when we stopped at a motel for the night. We’d gotten settled in and I remembered that I left my book in the car. I was going back out for it and Twitch was going to watch me from the door to make sure I was okay since it was night time and when I opened the car door, there was a guy that had been laying underneath it that stabbed me in the leg.”  
“What did agent Flemming do at that point?”  
“He ran for me and drew his gun, but a guy from the room next to ours came out and had a gun to his head. I recognized that one. We’d busted their boss last year for running marijuana out of the mountains. They obviously remembered us too.”  
“There were only two men?”  
“Yes.”  
“What then?”  
“I couldn’t run or anything because my leg had been stabbed and Twitch had a gun to his head so we let them tie us up and put us in the backseat of the car. We’ve gotten out of much worse. I wasn’t all that scared at the time.”  
“Where did they take you?”  
“I don’t know exactly where we were. We drove for miles out of the city. After a while they got smart and put bank bags over out heads so we couldn’t see. When we got there though, it was obvious there wouldn’t be any walking to town or anything like that.”  
“Did you see the outside of the compound?”  
“Not until we were leaving.”  
“Describe the inside of the compound.”  
She frowned. “You have the footage. You know what it looked like.”  
“We want to see what you recall from the situation Agent James. There is always a possibility of discrepancy in the case of any memory. Especially in a case of trauma.”  
“It was cinder block cells. There was one room with a two way mirror and a lot of cameras in it. There was a room where they would go for guns and other supplies. I don’t know much more than that. I was only ever in a cell or in the observation room. They bagged my head when they transported me.”  
The phone on my desk rang and I paused the video. It froze Griselda’s face into a leer of disgust.   
“Hello?” I answered.  
“Agent Barlow is here to see you.”

Wheels was a short, dwarven man with a gruff handshake and a palpable frankness in his mannerisms. “Let’s talk over food.” He said without introduction.  
“That’s fine.” I said.  
“What do you like to eat?”  
“Anything.”  
“Italian. I want something hearty.”  
We took his leather interior sports car and whizzed through town at top speed.   
“Smells new.” I noted.  
“It is.” He said, caressing the steering wheel like a lover.   
“Why’d you call me for a meeting?”  
“Have a little patience. I need food first. You in a hurry?”  
“No.” I said, taking hold of the handle by the door as we turned a corner doing fifty.  
He took me to a place called Isabella’s. It smelled like oregano and had white and red plaid table cloths over small, round tables.   
“Start me off with a glass of moscato and bring me out a plate of penne a la vodka in about fifteen minutes. I want fresh bread and oil and vinegar on my salad.” He handed the waiter his menu without looking up from his cellphone, where he was engaged in something that was making his eyebrows crinkle.  
The waiter looked at me expectantly. I hadn’t even had time to open the menu.   
“Do you serve spaghetti and meatballs?” I inquired.  
“We do.” He sighed.  
“That sounds lovely.”  
“So…” I began, turning back to Agent Barlow. He held up a finger to hush me and I waited until he was done pounding out an email. He looked up at me and turned the phone screen off.  
“Look. I meant it. I need bread first.”   
“Fair enough.” I replied.  
We sat in semi silence until the food came. He asked me about my watch. I told him it came from JC Penny’s. He laughed a little and took a drag from his Moscato. I asked him why he liked such sweet wine. He told me he didn’t like drinking stuff that tasted like barrel and ass.   
When he got his dish of pink-coated pasta and the bowl of salad, he dug into it with his elbows sprawled over the table, hovering over his plates with his eyes on me like a dog. I picked at my spaghetti, trying not to get red sauce all over my shirt and failing.   
“You even like pasta? We coulda gone somewhere else.” He said through a mouthful of garlic bread.   
“I do. I just should have gotten something easier to eat.”  
“You gotta get the twirl right. You’ll get it.”  
When we were done, he sat back and flagged our waiter down. “Two coffees.” He said.   
“I don’t drink much coffee.” I said.  
“I’ll drink yours if you don’t want it.”   
Once he’d sat the cups and saucers down and Wheels had put enough cream and sugar in his cup to incur diabetes, he finally sat back and began to talk.   
“You believe Twitch, don’t you?” He began.  
“Yeah. I do. Shouldn’t I?”  
“Everybody believes him. Blaming the victim. Classic. Specs always talks about that.”  
“There’s no evidence…”  
“Did you even watch the footage?”   
“Not yet…”  
“Then you don’t know.”  
“The board has reviewed it and they’re in favor of Agent Flemming. They think he’s suitable for duty.”  
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”  
“When exactly did you view the footage Agent Barlow?” I took a deep breath and slurped a sip of coffee. My face was hot.  
“I don’t need to. Why would she lie about something like that? Would you make something like that up? About your best friend?”  
“Agent James was severely compromised throughout the incident.”  
“Yeah, but she knows what she saw when she woke up.”  
“It was circumstantial.”   
He polished off his coffee and reached for mine. I let him take it. “The review board has no reason to side in favor of Agent Flemming’s story if the footage is congruent with Agent James’ story. What would their motive be?” I continued.   
He leaned forward like he was about to gossip about someone at the table next to ours.   
“They’re trying to replace her. She’s rogue. She does her own thing. How many incident reports does she get a year?”  
“More than any other agent.” I admitted.  
“So this is the easy way to take her out and leave in teacher’s pet.”  
“So you’re suggesting to me that the agency arranged the entire incident?”  
“No. That sick fuck you’ve sainted did all the ground work. This just fell into their laps.”  
“Have you been in contact with either Agent James or Agent Flemming since the incident?”  
“Just Specs.”  
“Maybe you should talk to Flemming.”  
“I’d kill him.”  
“Would you have acted differently in similar circumstances?”  
“I’d be dead. I’d have fought them. He gave in.” He polished off my coffee.  
“He got them both out alive.”  
“Yeah. And now look at her.”  
The ride back to work was silent. He took the curves even sharper than before.  
“Thank you for lunch.” I said. “I’ll take what you said into consideration.”  
“Do what’s right. For Specs.”

 

THURSDAY  
“I brought you an orange juice. I know you like them.” I handed the bottle to Griselda as she poked at the powdered eggs on her plastic plate.   
“Thanks.”   
“Wheels bought me lunch yesterday.”  
“For what?” She looked up at me for the first time in weeks.  
“Seemed to think I was siding with Agent Flemming’s story. Wanted to convince me otherwise.”  
“Do you believe him?” She asked.   
“I have no reason not to.”  
“So, you don’t believe me.”  
“I do believe you. What happened to you is entirely correct according to the board’s review of the footage, but the circumstances…”  
“Look, I don’t know everything. I get it. But if it’s me or Twitch losing a job, I don’t understand why I’m the one getting the shaft.”  
“We wouldn’t fire you, we’d just move you to a position in which you wouldn’t have to work with him.”  
“Doing what? Filing papers? Asking people redundant questions?”  
I took her chart off the table to take note of her sudden willingness to talk.   
“Make notes about people every time they fart?” She continued.   
“Point taken, Agent James.”   
When I returned to my office, I glanced at the footage dvd again and decided it could wait until Tuesday when I would have to watch it Agent Flemming again anyway. I pulled his first interview from my file and decided to take a look.   
I couldn’t see the board in his tape like I’d been able to in Griselda’s. It was just him in a chair, his dark eyes haggard behind his glasses. It was the only time I’d seen him that he wasn’t clean shaven. The stubble on his cheeks made him look closer to his age. I fast forwarded through his account of their abduction. His story was virtually identical to the one Griselda had told, but his was much more tedious in details.  
“And what did they do with you once you were at the compound?”  
“First, they took both of us to the third door on the left and put us both in there. The door was bolted so we couldn’t get out. There weren’t any windows. It was just an empty brick room.”   
“Did you try to plan an escape?”  
“No. We knew Wheels would barge in at any time or the agency would somehow find out.”  
“When did it become apparent that no one was coming as quickly as you’d assumed?”  
“Around two days in. I can’t say for sure. They took her from the cell we shared and put her somewhere else.”  
“How long were you alone?”  
“Three more days I guess.”  
“Did you believe Agent James to be dead?”  
“No.”   
“When was the next time you saw her?”  
“The end of the third day I’d been alone.”  
“How did it come about?”  
Samuel looked down at the tabletop and took a deep breath.   
“Two men in masks came for me. Plain masks-just bags with holes in the eyes. I knew it was the same who had kidnapped us. They were the right height and one was wearing the same gold ring on his right index finger. They took me to some kind of observation room where we could look through a two way mirror into the most well-lit room I encountered in the compound. There was a third man in the room they brought me. It was the first time I saw him. He spoke with a fake Russian accent through a voice altering microphone I couldn’t see under his mask.”  
“What did he tell you?”  
“He greeted me and told me that I would have to start doing things to keep Grizzy and I alive.”  
“What was in the bright room you referenced?”  
“Grizzy.”  
“Is that a nickname you use for Agent James?”  
“Yeah. It’s what I’ve called her since we were kids.”  
“What state was Agent James in?”  
“She was unconscious and nude. They had her tied down to a table.”  
“What did he tell you to do to her?”  
Samuel put his hand on his forehead and propped himself up on the table. “Is this really necessary?” He asked.  
“We need your personal account to compare to the footage we have.”  
“You know if I’m guilty or not. You can see what I did.”  
“We still need your account. I understand this must be difficult for you.”  
I paused the video. I’d read it enough to know. I didn’t have the stomach to watch him repeat himself over and over because his words were muffled into sobs. I didn’t have much stomach left for any of it. 

 

FRIDAY  
“Look who’s back.” Griselda said before I could greet her.   
“Thought you’d gotten rid of me or something?”  
“Thought I might have hurt your feelings.”  
“Not a chance.”  
“Gonna write down how I’m sitting with my arms crossed and being saucy today?”  
“Probably. I’d rather you insult me than sit there.”  
“What do you want today? Gonna tell me again how sad Twitch is?”  
“Did you always call him that?”  
“Twitch?”  
“Yeah. Is that an agency nickname or did you come up with that?”  
“I called him Sam growing up. Nothing special.”  
“Look, I know you’re tired of talking about it, but can you tell me what happened when you woke up?”  
She stared up at me like stone. “You have the interviews.”   
“Yeah, but I want to hear it from you live. Just me and you.”  
“Why? Trying to look for inconsistencies so you can prove I’m unreliable?”  
“No.” I emptied out my pockets and took off my coat to prove I wasn’t wired or with tape recorder. “You already know there aren’t any cameras in here.”  
“I don’t have to do this.”  
“You don’t. I just know what Twitch said. I’ve seen both interviews. I want to hear it from you so I can ask questions when I want. I’ll do it to him too, don’t worry. You’re not that special.”  
She looked past me out at the geese. “Why don’t you just ask me what you want to know? I’m sure you’ve watched me telling it enough.”  
“Alright. What exactly do you remember before you woke up?”  
“I was coming in and out all the time. I dreamed I saw all kinds of shit. Fish. My parents. Wheels. But I couldn’t hold onto any of it before I knocked out again.”  
“And when you woke up how did you know that what you were experiencing was real?”  
“Because he was talking to me. Everyone else had been silent up until then. And then my head got clearer.”  
“You never said before that he was talking to you.”  
“I didn’t want to.”   
“That’s important.”  
“Well, I’m telling you now.”  
“What did he tell you?”  
“He was just rambling. All kinds of nonsense about when we were kids. He was saying something about when we used to go ice skating at the park. He said something about summers on the river. It doesn’t matter. It didn’t make any sense.”  
“How long was it before you could speak?”  
“Maybe a few minutes.”  
“What did you say when you could?”  
“I told him to stop.”  
“What did he say?”  
“He said he couldn’t. That they would kill both of us or send someone else in after me.”  
“Was there anyone else in the room?”  
“I think so. I was still kind of out of it. Some big dude with a gun against Twitch’s head.”  
“So he was being threatened…”  
“I woke up and he was raping me. I told him to stop and the guy pressed the gun into his head and he kept fucking me until he came. I don’t know what else you could possibly want to know.”

 

MONDAY  
“You changed your mind?” Wheels was in my office splayed in a chair. I’d called him in for a quick interview.   
“I haven’t made my mind up yet.” I answered. He rolled his eyes.  
“Gonna try to blame me instead?” He was chewing on a toothpick. It sat in the corner of his mouth like a hay seed hanging from a farmer’s lip.   
“I just want to hear your account is all. You seem kind of neglected in all of this and it was you that found them. You’re the hero, after all.”  
“I don’t like smart asses.”  
“I’m not being a smart ass. Really. You found them. You’re at least half the reason they’re alive.”  
“What’s the other half?”  
“Agent Flemming’s actions.”  
“Oh jeez.”  
I pushed my sleeves up.  
“When did you know something had gone wrong?”  
“I guess about a week in. They’re both quick movers and something seemed off.”  
“How did you find them?”  
“I remembered where we’d busted those drug smugglers before and I figured it was somewhere close to that. I was right.”  
“How long did you search?”  
“Two, three days once I got back to Kentucky.”  
“Well, was it two days or three?”  
He flicked the toothpick from his mouth to my carpet.   
“Three. Plus, I’d already called for backup from the agency when I got there.”  
“So, instead of calling for backup when you suspected they were in danger, you waited until you single-handedly located a compound hidden deep in the Kentucky wilderness to call for backup?”  
“What the fuck are you trying to say?”  
“I’m just asking questions. It’s not how I would have done things is all.”  
“Well it’s what I did.”  
“Did you storm the compound by yourself?”  
“No.”  
“Then how did you know they were in there? Or is this where you called for back up for a nondescript cinderblock house in the mountains of Kentucky?”  
“Just like you told me. The board stands with my testimony. I don’t need to answer any of this. I’ve already told my story.” He pushed himself up from the chair and began to leave my office.   
“Do your best Russian accent for me.” I said. He stopped.   
“Fuck you.”  
“Why?”  
“You know what.”  
“Why would that be offensive if you haven’t heard anything but Agent James’ story? In all my files and interviews, only Agent Flemming mentions the man with the Russian accent. You wouldn’t have access to that unless I cleared it. Everything goes through me now. That’s how it works when you’re the case worker.”  
He popped the collar of his coat so that it lay flat and kept walking toward my door.   
“Thank you for your time, Agent Barlow.” I called after him. 

 

TUESDAY  
“Is today the day?” I asked Griselda as I sat her bottle of orange juice on her bedside table.  
“It’s nine weeks today, isn’t it? I get to go home next week.”  
“Yep.”  
“I’ll be bored out of my mind without your bugging me.”  
“You can always call and I can bug you over the phone.”  
“Fat chance.”  
She almost smiled. Almost.   
“You know he’s out there. What do you want me to say?” I asked.  
“Tell him to go home.”  
“Are you sure?”  
“I always am.”  
He was in the same armless, green, plastic chair that he’d been in every Tuesday prior since they’d put Griselda into treatment. Tuesday was visiting day and he was the only visitor she ever got besides that first day when Wheels had come by. She refused him every week. He was wearing pressed chinos, dress shoes, and a sweater like always. His socks had frogs on them that particular day. He’d kept himself clean shaven since they’d been home and when he looked up at me as I stepped out of her room, he seemed childlike in his hope.   
“She said no.” I told him.  
He nodded once, like always, and stood up to go.   
“If you’ll hang around for a bit longer, you can watch the footage. They released it to me if you still want to see it.”  
“I think I should. I don’t know why. It’s not something I want to remember. I just…”  
“It’s going to be hard.”  
“I know.”  
I grabbed the dvd off my desk and took it to the video room. It was too sensitive for me to bear to watch it with him alone in my office.   
“Do you want to watch this by yourself?” I asked.  
“I don’t care. Have you seen it?”  
“No.”  
“I don’t care. You’ll watch it one way or another whether I’m in the room with you or not.”  
I put the dvd in and paused it right at the beginning. Griselda was strapped down to the table and nude just like Samuel had said. Her legs were tied to stirrups so that they were open.   
“What had you been told before you went into this room?” I asked him. He was sitting in the first row of fold out chairs near the old tv strapped to a cart. I was sitting near the back.  
“They told me that someone was going to take advantage of her. That she was out cold and wouldn’t remember any of it. They told me if I didn’t do it, then one of them would.”  
“Why did you do it?” I asked. They’d asked him in interviews a hundred times why he did it. They asked him if he enjoyed it. They asked him if he would do it again if he could go back to the moment of his decision. They asked him if he felt any remorse over it. They dissected him and tried to glue him back together, but it was no use.   
“I did it because it was the only way I could know. I didn’t know what they would actually do. I didn’t know if they would hurt her in other ways. I didn’t know if they had diseases or if they would try to get her pregnant. I analyzed it from every possible angle and came to the conclusion that if I did it, I would at least know. I tried to imagine what I would want her to do if she was making the decision and it’s what I would have wanted.” He spoke with confidence now. He’d had time to mull it over. When he was fresh from the compound, half his words had been unintelligible through his hysteria.   
I played the footage. Griselda was on the table. The door on the right side of the screen opened and Samuel walked in with a man behind him pointing a gun between his shoulder blades.   
“They wanted to make sure I didn’t try to pull anything clever.” He commented-his eyes fixed to the screen.  
He began unbuttoning his pants while the guy remained at his back. He said in interviews that they’d already taken his belt so he couldn’t try to use it as a weapon. He began to consider getting on the table as he was when the gunman told him he had to at least take his pants and boxers off.   
“I’m gonna watch it go in. Gotta make sure you aren’t bluffing.” He said.   
Samuel did as he was told and pulled his socks off too. He fumbled at the hem of his sweater for a moment but decided to leave it on.   
For almost a full two minutes of the footage, Samuel stood by the table without moving.   
“I couldn’t make myself move.” He said to me.  
When the gunman got tired of it, he pressed the barrel of the gun into his temple.  
“Go.” He said.   
Samuel climbed onto the table and positioned himself between Griselda’s legs. He was still flaccid. The gunman noticed. “It’ll get hard.” He said and made a motion with the gun for Samuel to move toward her.   
Samuel leaned over her and moved the hair they’d left matted to her face. “I’m so sorry.” He said. It was barely audible on film.   
The gunman watched him enter her-leaned over so that he was eye level for it. He put the gun back at Samuel’s temple. “I’ll check her when you’re done. If you don’t cum, we’ll get someone else in here.”  
“That wasn’t part of the deal.” He put his finger on the trigger.   
“This isn’t a deal.”  
Griselda’s head was lolling back and forth like she was having nightmares. Perhaps the moments of lucidity she remembered in spurts.   
“Grizzy. Can you hear me? Are you there at all?” Samuel asked. She didn’t respond-just kept rolling her head back and forth.   
“Move.” The gunman said. Samuel began carefully rocking himself back and forth against her, all the while talking.   
The audio wasn’t perfect, but I caught enough of it.   
“I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can I just want you to know that I’m really sorry. This wasn’t my choice and I don’t want you to be afraid. I would never do this to you without a gun to my head. You know that. You know that’s true.” He leaned up so that his face was closer to hers. So she could hear him better. “Everything’s going to be okay. They’re going to find us and this will all just be a really bad dream.   
“Why’d you keep talking like that?” I asked him.   
“I really hoped she could hear me. There was a chance she could.”  
“She didn’t.”  
“I know.”  
He continued like that for sometime, mumbling reassurances while her head rolled. After a while he seemed to be able to move a little better.   
“Did you get hard?” I asked him. It was an incredibly personal question I’d have never thought to ask someone in a situation like this, but he’d been grilled and analyzed since their return to the point that something like that was conversational.   
“Yeah. After a while. I guess it was just a reaction.”  
“I didn’t mean it was wrong. I was just wondering I guess.”  
“You aren’t the first.”  
After a while he got hot from the continuous movement and shucked his sweater so that he was only in his glasses. His speaking was so soft that I really only caught non linear chunks here and there. “When we lost my brother’s cat…always said we’d go hiking there…I’ll understand if you hate me.”  
Somewhere around that time, her head seemed to begin rolling with more purpose, as if she was trying to lift it.   
“Grizzy?” He asked, never once stopping his rhythm-the cold metal still hard against his skull. She didn’t reply. I noticed that there was blood on the table.   
“Was that her first time?”  
“Yeah.”  
He kept talking to her and eventually, her eyes began to flutter open. She smiled at first, when she was awake, though she kept coming and going. When she finally woke up, it still took her a moment to process exactly what was going on. She initially smiled at the sight of Sam and then when the rest of her sensational aspects were acquired, her face contorted.  
“Stop.” She said weakly, still not completely able or cognizant.   
“I can’t.” He said. “If I do, they’ll kill me and then hurt you.”  
“Sam, stop.” She said again and he did. He stopped moving just long enough for the gunman to move the gun from Samuel’s head to point it at Griselda’s. And then he began again.   
She looked up at the gunman who was still standing behind Samuel and came near to hyperventilation. It was the first time she’d noticed him after coming too.   
“No. Look at me.” Sam said.   
“I don’t want to look at you!” She yelled.   
“Just, don’t look past my shoulder.” He said.   
“Please.” She said, crying now. “Please stop.”  
Samuel closed his eyes and moved harder. It was hurting her. “I’m sorry.” He was near tears too. “I’m so sorry.” He finally came and he lingered for a moment to make sure the evidence would be there for the gunman.   
He slid off the table and almost immediately fell into weeping. He grabbed at his clothes on the floor to cover himself, but couldn’t seem to get anything on the right way. His buttons were backward and his sweater was wrong side out. Still, as soon as he was clothed, he ran to the head of the table where Griselda had closed her eyes and was still crying. The gunman inspected her and gave a thumbs up to the two way mirror on the wall.   
She fought manically at the restraints and just as Samuel reached her, he scarcely had time to move hair stuck to her cheeks before the gunman yanked his arm toward the door.   
“No.” He said. “I need to talk to her. I need to see her.”   
“You’ve seen plenty of her.”  
“I’m sorry.” He said to her as he was being pushed out of the door. And the recording ended.


End file.
